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we will return to a key point and elaborate on it. It was mentioned that
with LSD, everything that you see, whether the eyes are open or closed,
can seem to be shining and glowing like jewels. This is especially true
with the eyes closed. It's a big part of the special flavor of the LSD
experience. Aldous Huxley was especially interested in this aspect and
had very interesting theories about its meaning. He was saying that precious
stones are considered precious, not because they are rare or pretty, but
because they remind people of what they see in visionary, religious experiences
involving changes in consciousness. On page 65 of Moksha,
Huxley says: "My own view is that an explanation for the preciousness of precious stones must be sought, first of all, in the facts of visionary experience. Gem-like objects, bright, self-luminous, glowing with preternatural color and significance, exist in the mind's Antipodes, are seen by visionaries and are felt by all who see them to be of enormous significance. In the objective world, the things which most nearly resemble these self-luminous visionary objects are gems. Precious stones are held to be precious, because they remind human beings of the Other World at the mind's Antipodes, the Other World of which visionaries are fully conscious and ordinary persons are obscurely and, as it were, subterraneously aware. There is a special kind of beauty, which we say is 'transporting'. The adjective is well chosen; for it is literally true that certain spectacles do carry away the mind of the beholder, carry it out of the everyday world of common, conceptualized experience into the magical Other World of nonverbal visionary experience." Like with everything else about LSD, the gems that you see while tripping are infinitely richer, brighter, shinier and more dazzling than any gem that you will see during usual waking consciousness. This concept goes back to Socrates. In Moksha, Aldous Huxley mentions Socrates on p. 192: "What Socrates says about this world, which he calls the other earth, is again that in this other earth, everything shines, that the very stones of the road and on the mountains have the quality of precious stones; and he ends up by saying that the precious stones of our earth, our highly valued emeralds, rubies, and so on, are but infinitestimal fragments of the stones which are to be seen in this other earth; and this other earth, where everything is brighter and clearer and more real than in our world is, he says, a vision of blessed beholders." Did Socrates deserve to be murdered by the authorities for talking like that? Huxley, in Moksha, says more on page 273: "This richness of gem-like qualities, which is found in the visionary world, does explain many strange facts about certain types of art and many facts about the curious, uniform quality of religious traditions, folklore traditions, traditions of the nature of the Golden Age and After Life, which are found all over the world." Staying with Huxley and the book of his writings, letters and speeches about psychedelic drugs, Moksha, he says on page 203: "There are all kinds of realistic, naturalistic visionary experiences, experiences of architectures, of landscapes, of figures. It is interesting to find that again and again in the accounts given by people of visionary experiences, we find the same elements described, for example, in Heinrich Kluver's book on peyote where he sums up most of the material which had been published up to the time he wrote it. We find again and again this description of luminous landscapes and architectures encrusted with gems, the whole world of landscape is filled with what Ezekiel calls the stones of fire. These descriptions of course very closely parallel all the accounts of paradises, posthumous worlds and fairylands which are found in all the traditions of the world." |